


Slave, Hero, Martyr: Some Notes Towards a Biography of Anakin Skywalker

by countessofbiscuit



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Age of Empire, Gen, History, In-Universe Non-Fiction, Meta, Order 66, Post-Star Wars: Bloodline, Star Wars: Propaganda, Worldbuilding, circa 32 ABY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-06
Updated: 2018-11-06
Packaged: 2019-08-05 08:10:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,788
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16364114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/countessofbiscuit/pseuds/countessofbiscuit
Summary: Turlough Fraxin’s essay “The Hero with No Fear,” originally presented in 14 BBY at a conference of the Inner Rim Society of Ancient History on Brentaal IV, earned the adventurous academic a five-year prison sentence as a Jedi sympathizer. Now an honorary member of the New Republic Historical Council, Fraxin reflects on her search for Anakin Skywalker’s life, and the perils and difficulties of conducting sound historical research under the Empire in a new essay forIn the Darkness Between the Stars: Forgotten Histories of the Galaxy(Ed. Vars Chuchi).





	Slave, Hero, Martyr: Some Notes Towards a Biography of Anakin Skywalker

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Luthe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luthe/gifts).



> Written for Fandom Trumps Hate 2018.  
> The prompt requested "something like the life of Anakin Skywalker as told by a future historian who only has fragments of documentation to work from." Redaction of information, cries of fake news, harassment of journalists, gaslighting ... crimes of the Empire or your average day in the Trump administration?  
> Thank you to naberiie for allowing me to expand on _In the Darkness Between Stars,_ from their fic ["Echoes of Malevolence"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12745926); and to tiend for allowing me to borrow the Cultural Annexe idea.

Where were you when you first heard the name Anakin Skywalker? You probably remember. Particularly long-lived readers might recall its association with a famous podrace or any number of heroics during the Clone Wars. For those born during the Empire, it was a name pulled out from Darth Vader’s long shadow, the dirty truth shaken out of that murderer’s cape, when Carise Sindian revealed the true parentage of Princess Leia Organa on the Senate floor two years ago.1

In one of those strange hyperloops of life, I was sitting in a tapcaf on Brentaal when the news broke, on the very campus where uttering Anakin’s name had earned me a prison sentence. Forty years later, it droned from the holobroadcast like the forecast on Chandrila or the weekend’s limmie results, and I had to double-check how many cafshots I had ordered. Suddenly, I felt very grateful to be alive. Darth Vader — or rather, his associates, for I don’t flatter myself that my little biography of his early life ever reached him — had done far worse to others for much less. 

_Skywalker_ we all knew. Skywalker was the rebel hero of Yavin and Endor, and later the great spiritualist-cum-archaeologist dedicated to reviving the Jedi Order. 2 But at the time of the Republic’s fall, Skywalker referred only to Anakin. Anakin was the Skywalker I knew. Not personally, though we would be about the same age, but from the intimacy of flimsi trails and the gaps within them where the researcher has to walk in the shoes of another. In Anakin’s case, the gaps were more like canyons, and the flimsi trail would not have been worth even a cheap datastick. The burning and occupation of the Jedi Temple, COMPOR, its brutally efficient successor COMPNOR, and the ISB’s stranglehold on the HoloNet all saw to that. 

Five years after the “victory over the Separatist movement,” Imperial-aligned historians employed by the Ministry of Information were still laboring over the official history of the late Clone War, even though they had exclusive access to Republic records, sites of battle, and all remaining archives.3 The lauded Celebratus Archive on Obroa-Skai had been ransacked by Admiral Thrawn. The Cultural Annexe on Coruscant, that beloved and eccentric Republic repository, was cut off from funding and sat unstaffed, so inaccessible that it would have required a team of urban explorers to infiltrate — the project for an archaeologist with a deathwish, not a literature historian with a tattered podrace poster and some invoices. Every collection you tried, the ISB got there first; and if you wanted to practice history under the Empire, you had to stick to government-authorized sources. 

It left my peers in universities and institutions across the galaxy with very little material at all, however inoffensive and “irrelevant” their fields of research. Unwilling to watch idly as a black hole in the historical record opened up, many of us diverted our attention from our usual subjects to become, by necessity, oral historians and cultural anthropologists. We researched the legacy of the Clone Wars through materials and memories, eager to record the accounts of those eyewitnesses willing to come forward, usually only under assurances of the strictest confidence.

* * *

1New Republic. First Senator Nomination Hearing, 28 ABY. 24th Galactic Senate. 3rd sess. Republic City, Hosnian Prime. Senatorial Publications. HoloNet. 30 ABY.  
2Ancient historians were distraught to learn that Luke had disappeared, many still living in hope that he might finally answer their pleas to speak at a conference and share his textual findings.  
3When asked about the delay in publication, the Ministry always cited “insufficient resources,” which academics found highly ironic.

* * *

Of course, one integral group of participants in that conflict could not step forward: the generals and commanders of the Jedi Order. Their testimony of events, even their biographical information, was a mystery, their lives as distant to us then as they are now. The Order was archaic even in its own time, cryptic and inscrutable, its members never officially named or paraded before the HoloNews, and the aftermath of the Jedi Purge fully relegated them to the status of ancient history. They were the remit of the philosopher who wished to understand how a religious sect could veer so far from their path of peace; it was not the task of the historian to unearth more about their existence or, stars forbid, their personalities. 

Officially, Anakin Skywalker existed only in a terse HoloNews bulletin from the Battle of Coruscant, confirming him as the famed “Hero with No Fear” who rescued Chancellor Palpatine by hijacking General Grievous’s flagship.4 He was presumed to have died in the general confusion of the “Jedi Rebellion” at the Temple, though COMPOR did not oblige Republic citizens with a live stream of murdered Jedi. No official statement on the hero’s death was ever made. A scattering of interchangeable corpses across the galaxy, some lightsabers dropping from great heights, a quick and seamless snuffing out: that was how the Empire wished the Jedi to be remembered and that was how Anakin was forgotten. 

Unofficially, I had enough artefacts and data testifying to the kind of life Anakin led to make me curious and ultimately “seditious.”5 What was supposed to be a lucky sabbatical to edit an anthology on the Rakatan Water Poets turned into a year of investigative work into the impression left by the Jedi across the galaxy, particularly that of Anakin. I wanted to put a name to a reputation, a life to a shadow, and to encourage an apolitical discussion of beings who had once walked among us. The slim paper that emerged was written to be as tepid as possible, using only sources that were supposed to be inoffensive by ISB standards, if dire by academic ones.

Anakin was a singular case because he came to the Jedi rather late in life, and had already made a name for himself outside the Order: as the winner of the Boonta Eve Classic of ‘32. It was in this context that he was remembered in the Outer Rim and how he first came to my attention. As something of an enthusiast, I had watched that race in a Corellian cantina, and I managed to get my hands on a commemorative poster that featured Anakin’s picture. When it was learned that he went off-planet with some Jedi, the podracing community was disappointed for his career, but many argued that he must be Force-sensitive and it would, despite his age, continue to give him an unfair advantage. So Anakin passed into podracing history as the golden-haired champion of Mos Espa, and until the Battle of Coruscant, that was that. 

When I picked up the trail of Anakin’s life in that infamous spaceport some fifteen years later, the impression among local barkeeps and spacers was that Anakin had gone off with the Jedi to be a pilot — the kid was too old to be a Jedi, they told me, more than one echoing the old refrain that was especially prevalent beyond the Core even before the Purge: that the Jedi were baby thieves. There was no arguing with them on that point or Anakin’s actual status as a Jedi; HoloNews bulletins never did carry much weight in the Rim. Instead I followed their advice to inquire after a Toydarian junk dealer who had _owned_ Anakin, once upon a time. 6 To discover the Jedi poster boy had once been a slave was extraordinary; the flimsi testifying to the purchase of Anakin’s mother Shmi from a Hutt, and the even smaller scrap confirming the — for lack of a better word — _sale_ of Anakin to one Qui-Gon Jinn of the Jedi Order in place of the Boonta Eve winnings, I now regard as two of my most pivotal findings. So much of what I have come to understand about Anakin’s life — and, bit by bit, of Vader’s ruthlessness — hinged on the history of those pieces of flimsi. 

The Toydarian allowed me to make holocopies, but he did not offer much else, only confirming privately that when he last saw Anakin, just days before the Battle of Geonosis, there was no doubting that his former slave had become a Jedi. Anakin’s mother Shmi he had sold to a moisture farmer named Lars, whose homestead was out towards a distant town called Anchorhead, but she had died sometime after Anakin’s visit. What with the considerable distance, my poor relations with eopies, and the Toydarian’s assurance that members of the Lars homestead never went anywhere without slugthrowers, I decided not to risk life and limb for a chance at _that_ primary source. There were no other Skywalkers, my source told me then, and as far as he and the rest of the galaxy knew, that was correct. 

* * *

4The implication being that he killed Count Dooku along the way, although this was not stated at the time; Republic citizens were remarkably tolerant of vague news.   
5In the course of my research for Anakin’s biography, I have made contact with some beings whose personal archives related to the Order would have made my post-graduate self either weep or quake with fear.   
6To protect my sources, my original essay omitted all names, a courtesy I still carry forward where I feel it is appropriate. In this case, the enslavement of a Force-sensitive child is said to bring a curse on the owner, and the Toydarian did not wish it to be generally known. 

* * *

Satisfied with my findings on Tatooine, I turned to another group of people who would have had firsthand experience with the Jedi, but dealings with whom required an overabundance of caution: clone troopers. Attempting to interview those still in active service would have been suicide, as well as generally unproductive. Four years into the Empire, however, they were being phased out at a rapid rate, and there were some “retirees” willing to talk, if one knew where to look. A large community of clones had taken up squatting in The Works, given the short commute to the docks where so many of them toiled until they simply expired or drank themselves to death in one of the bars on the fringe of their settlement. After days and days loitering outside one of these, making my presence conspicuous but non-threatening, one of them approached me.

It was one of the most tragic conversations of my life: a roundabout, contradictory history of the war, and comrades named after things but called “brothers,” and the “traitors” who saved their lives time and again.7 Given what we now know of the invasive manipulation of their psychology,8 quizzing this veteran about the Jedi was not only cruel, but I now question the ethics of using his testimony in my original paper as I did — not that I quoted much beyond what I could confirm with a DarkNet search. The veteran actually had very little to say on Anakin, having only seen him in action once on Felucia. But what struck me at the time was his repetition, again and again, that Anakin was a “flashy ace pilot” and that his unit, the 501st, would _never_ betray him. Were there any 501st veterans in The Works? No, he said, the 501st was for life. Given such admittances as these, and the surmises that could be made about the crack unit then just starting to be called “Vader’s Fist,” it is not surprising The Works were cleared of old clones within a few years. 

The veteran did direct me to my next groundbreaking point-of-call, a diner in the Garlab district known for being a favorite haunt of Jedi. It was there I found another motherlode of Jedi artefacts, the casual collection of one humble Dexter Jettster, who had passed away about a year before. The new proprietor was a former waitress, and she had kept his “office” locked and relatively intact. Among such curious articles as a map of suspected Separatist hyperlanes scribbled across a series of napkins, an old remote droid embossed with the Jedi crest, and a series of flimsi invitations to events at the Jedi Temple, were two items that I cited in my paper.

The first was an extremely rare holocube featuring Anakin, one of a set of commemorative collectibles produced by Biscuit Baron in the first two months after Geonosis. It was a crude likeness and a cheap product; but upon the company’s recall of the cubes,9 they went up remarkably in value, so much so that collectors would not admit to having them for fear of theft, or later of outright confiscation as COMPOR became almost paranoid about safeguarding the image of its generals. The cube showed a young man with close-cropped brown hair and a Padawan braid, wielding a green lightsaber with a mechno-arm. When I enquired about this, the proprietor told me he actually wielded a blue lightsaber, but that everything else was accurate. 

The second item was far more personal and perhaps my favorite finding of all: a flimsi holopic of Anakin — with longer hair and a scar just shy of his right eye — wearing a headlamp and standing in a cave alongside a beaming Togruta girl. The caption on the bottom read, “Greetings from Subterrel!! from Snips & Skyguy.” The girl was Ahsoka Tano, of course, the only Jedi whose face was ever plastered across every level of Coruscant in connection with a bombing at the Temple.10 I was struck by the familiarity of their pose, the use of nicknames, and while the proprietor of the diner could not — or would not, as the case usually was — confirm it, I was convinced from that moment that Ahsoka Tano had been Anakin’s Padawan. 

The mechno-arm discovery actually yielded my most bizarre source: a Coruscanti prosthetics specialist. While the Jedi Order sourced almost everything from refugee communities and Agri-Corps camps, their technology and medical equipment was provided by the Republic.11 Certain businesses were granted exclusive contracts to supply and outfit the Jedi, and although these "warrants" were more a reflection on the friends and pocket interests of the sitting Judicial Oversight Committee than the tastes of the Order, any company advertising an Order warrant was guaranteed considerable visibility in the public consciousness. So there was no question who supplied Anakin Skywalker’s mechno-arm. The real surprise came when I visited the specialist, who practically tripped over themselves to give me Anakin’s designs for his own prosthetic — a whole pile of flimsi with finely drawn forearm pistons and knuckle joints, scribbled across or drawn over in red marker, with one drawn in blue that bore Anakin’s own signature. From these and the specialist’s limited knowledge, Anakin’s injury by another lightsaber and his meticulous interest in mechanics received excellent treatment in my paper — almost an entire page’s worth, which was considerable in a piece as sparse as what I submitted to the Inner Rim Society of Ancient History’s annual conference in 15 BBY.

* * *

7T. Fraxin, 15 BBY, Comm File No. 38746, Oral Histories Database, New Galactic Museum of the Clone Wars.   
8see: F. Billaba, _Chips or Choice? Towards a Better Understanding of Order 66_ (Chalacta, 12 ABY); C. Kryze, _Bred to Die: The Story of the Republic’s Clone Trooper Program_ (Sundari, 20 ABY).  
9The recall was advertised as part of a trading-up deal, but it was likely instigated at the request of the government, or even the Order itself, when concerns were raised about the public face of the Order being promoted via a fast-food chain. Biscuit Baron’s parent company TaggeCo had connections in the Senate and profited enormously under the Empire.   
10If Anakin only ever existed in a HoloNews ticker, Ahsoka Tano survived only in wanted holos and bounty adverslicks. The Empire allowed her name to survive as a terrorist, a Mandalorian paramilitary agent, and later, a dangerous fugitive. She has, famously, never been confirmed dead.  
11V. G. Rochti, _Force Funding: The Fiscal Structure and Finances of the Jedi Order, 100-19 BBY_ (Muunilinst, 23 ABY)

* * *

The IRSAH editorial board naturally rejected my paper on Anakin Skywalker for the official proceedings, but they agreed to let me present it in place of a proxy work, a decision I always considered courageous, although it was only made with the understanding that I would stand alone should the ISB take umbrage at my research. Which they did, somewhere around the seventh paragraph. I was ushered off stage by a plainclothes agent, placed in binders, and rather politely asked to confess to being a Jedi sympathizer. I complied, honestly and without hesitation, although there was nothing polite about the sentence.12

Upon the fall of the Empire, when the HoloNet was a complete free-for-all and speculation flew hither and yon, the Alliance put out a brief, official statement acknowledging Luke Skywalker as the son of Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker, with sources close to the latter confirming this. It had long been a mainstay of Imperial propaganda that the rebels had simply appropriated the name of a Clone Wars hero to garner support for its cause, and though chary of Imperial motivations, I too was skeptical of the existence of another Skywalker, given what I had been told on Tattooine. The reluctance on both sides to ‘claim’ Anakin spoke to his contested legacy, even at the time. Here was a Jedi—albeit one who had broken sufficiently with the Code to father a child and who had been extremely close to Palpatine to the last—being acknowledged as a ‘hero’ of the Clone Wars by the Empire, and the only reply the Alliance wished to make was to state that he did indeed father a child. There was no celebration of Anakin’s life, no statement whatever about Luke’s mother, and, for many years, no official inquest into the “Jedi Rebellion” in which Anakin supposedly took part. 

So historians, myself among them, began anew — this time without the threat of plainclothes agents watching from behind potted plants. Upon the establishment of the New Republic, the University of Garos was designated the seat of the New Republic Historical Council and it was there that the instrumental work of making secret Imperial files accessible for researchers began. If those files were both limited in scope and difficult to slice, thanks to the sabotaging efforts of the ISB, think how challenging it has been to interpret the mangled Republic databases, with their contents redacted, deleted, or simply rewritten — sometimes so skillfully, it will take many years still for historians to arrive at anything approaching the objective truth about what happened in the waning years of the Republic.

At the time of the revelations in the Senate, I had returned wholly to literature of the Rakatan period, amusing myself on weekends by corroborating and expanding on the facts in my old Anakin paper using the Garos resources and, ironically, the information-crowdsourcing capabilities of the unregulated shadowfeeds that had been set up by the CIS during the Clone Wars. Researchers were able to wade through parsecs of Imperial incident reports, mundane personnel files, and surveillance logs that survived data sweeps, but access to the old Imperial Palace was highly restricted until the Senate could come to some agreement on whether it was to be preserved as a monument, transformed into a museum, used as evidence in the prosecution of war crimes, or even returned to the Order by way of Luke Skywalker, should he claim it. Given this deadlock of affairs, it is perhaps little wonder that the artefact solving the greatest mystery of our time — who was Lord Vader? — was a music box sitting in an old chest on a sleepy rimward world. 

In the days after the news broke, I reached out to Organa’s staff asking for a ten-minute holocall about her brother. I was very specific in my request, aware that she was being pressed on all sides for comments on her shocking parentage, and that she might be more willing to speak about the reasons for keeping her relationship with Luke from public knowledge.13 Organa granted me a full hour, and while we began on the subject of Luke and her public image, we quickly came onto the shared understanding she and Luke had of Anakin. One has no right to tell a child how to feel about their parent, but I so desperately wanted her to know that the faint impression of _Anakin’s_ life on the galaxy — not Vader’s — had inspired people to keep the Jedi from fading wholly into obscurity, at least in academic circles. 

Organa responded kindly and surprised me by saying she had read my illicit paper, some years ago. Apparently, during an inventory of Mas Amedda’s surrendered data after the Galactic Concordance, my ISB case file was flagged for containing the name “Skywalker,” and there were notes in Amedda’s hand reducing my sentence from transportation to a work camp (little better than a death sentence) to five years imprisonment on Coruscant,14 as well as some prescient remarks about the necessity of emphasizing Anakin as a rogue element in the Order, so that the Skywalker name — where it was known — might not be martyrized. 

Some half-century after Anakin’s “death” in the Temple, it is probably too much to hope that some fresh source of information, some wellspring of first-hand knowledge, will emerge from the devastating shadow of the Empire to illuminate the life of that Hero with No Fear. But many things have been lost among the stars, and I live in hope that with works like this publication, we are turning the corner of that long aphelion of the story of the Old Republic. In the meantime, my biography of Anakin Skywalker, _Slave, Hero, Martyr,_ is set for publication next year. 

* * *

12No one from that board is still alive, but upon my release we were able to make contact briefly, joking together that I spent five years in prison not for seditious libel, but for a much greater crime: presenting a rejected paper at a conference! For more on my trial and imprisonment, see _Podium Protests: A History of Intellectual Sedition during the Empire_ , Ed. Y. Quinn (Brentaal IV, 18 ABY).  
13Organa’s biography as a common war orphan adopted into the Alderaani royal family received no revisionist treatment in the wake of the Empire, and only the news that she was Vader’s daughter could have surprised people more than the news that she and Luke were twins.  
14No reason was given for this, except the conspicuous circling of “Chagrian” in my profile. For more on Grand Vizier Amedda’s tempering influence on some of the Empire’s xenophobic policies, see _Humanoid: The Legacy of Imperial Speciesism_ by Tinn Ruawathu’andu.

* * *


End file.
